Montana's State Auditor and Commissioner of Insurance Matt Rosendale is calling Governor Steve Bullock's veto of House Bill 652 an act of 'petty politics'.

Rosendale, who just returned from spending several days in Washington, D.C. speaking with government officials about healthcare, was deeply disappointed to return home to find the bill had been vetoed.

"We worked for quite some time on drafting HB 652 which would have given us the ability to request a waiver from the federal government to create a 'Made in Montana' insurance program or other mechanism to stabilize the health insurance marketplace and reduce the cost of health insurance," Rosendale said. "Regardless of whether Obamacare had been repealed or not, this waiver would have put us in a position to develop a program to help folks with these preexisting conditions and those in high risk groups."

Rosendale said Governor Bullock's reason for the veto was that the bill would have placed too much power in Rosendale's office.

"Representative Cook said it best when he said I wonder if it had been a Democrat still occupying this office whether the governor would have thought there was still too much authority in their hands," he said. "This would have been another tool that folks could have utilized, and the governor simply vetoed it, and he really couldn't show another other reason than petty politics."

Rosendale said Governor Bullock hung vulnerable Montanans out to dry and abandoned people struggling to make ends meet with his veto of bipartisan House Bill 652.